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Reed Hastings has been gone from that board for a couple of years now.

I get annoyed with the notices from other sites that are asking for Silverlight. It's usually stuff on the login page. eBay and Tumblr (I think) are notable examples, but I've encountered several others.

Yeah, I don't get it. Most of the commercial stations are Clear Channeled, even some "non commercial" stations are following the general model. Basically the same rotation of the same small pool of songs every day, If we're lucky, a song gets changed out in the pool once a month, and songs you'd think were played out from the incessant repetition are still playing a couple years later. I don't understand how people can stand that.

Yes, the ruggedness is the main priority. Once a piece of hardware is certified and flight-tested, you have so much invested in the computer design that you don't want to just throw away the design because there are faster chips for sale.

And there's the question of whether the extra processing power is beneficial for the task at hand. Why pay more for extra processing power that isn't used anyway? There's likely a finer degree of control and timing now, but it's not like reentry physics has gotten more complicated in the past 12 years.

Airbus has many plants around the world building parts for them. Sometimes air is the best way to go. If it had to go by boat, you have a lot of money invested in airframes stuck on a boat for a month or two. Assuming you didn't need custom cargo ships, I don't think those fuselages can fit in a container.

There are a lot of factors that affect fuel mileage, but it's been suggested that the ECM can detect whether they're on a standardized emissions or efficiency test and change the settings accordingly. I wish I remembered where I had seen that article.

Yeah, there's been problems, and there is increasing budget pressure. It seems NASA is the only government organization that actually get consistently cut. I kind of agree with Ares I getting cut, it was a boondoggle and suffing some problems that weren't well-publicized.

I wonder if you're citing end of sales with OS X "died" dates, not end of support. End of support (updates, etc.) is different from no longer offering for sale.For example, OS X 10.7 still seems to get security updates. Going by end of sales, Windows XP "died" June 2008.

Ars Technica just did an article suggesting that 10.6 isn't getting security updates anymore. The same article says 10.7 just got an update too.

So your figures for OS X might be exaggerated. That said, you're correct that XP has gotten unusually long support.

3D printing is a pretty poor name. It's all additive techniques, of which there are at least six major types, I think. And they go from inexpensive hobbyist machines to over a million dollars.

They're useful technologies, but I think people are getting ahead of themselves. The focus should be on doing things that couldn't be done as well before, not making existing things, but more poorly and more expensively and thinking that's going to change the world. There are some uses though, tor example, I think GE has an turbine engine injector design that's now one piece instead of 23 pieces when done with conventional machining. In the GE case, it's a benefit, less complexity, less weight. Making a plastic tape measure with plastic tape, that looks like a waste of material & time.

Yeah, metric drill bits are harder to find. I generally use number & letter gauge drills and just use the closest one. For my needs, the tiny difference is negligible. But I don't make aerospace & government parts, if so, then I'd use the specified size. A lot of cities seem to have a nearby machine tool supplier (there's two in my nearby mid-sized city), and they'll sell you just about any variation of metric tooling you want.

The consumer accessible UV printers don't do flexible items yet. I don't know what method the Connex uses, I guess it makes sense it's UV. So it may be a matter of waiting for the material technology to go down in price. The current cheapest I've seen is the material costs $50 a liter for a rigid material, and that material isn't very good that I've seen.